There is a powerful movement towards simple and easy software targeting end users. Most distributions focussing there use Gnome for it, but KDE appplications also have a lot of potential. The technology is there, it’s just, by default, cluttered and complicated in some areas. openSUSE has always had a great KDE based distribution, it’s our stronghold. Like most distributions, we shipped a mostly vanilla desktop. We polished some area’s, stabilized and backported some upstream patches but not much more. Only Mandriva currently ships a heavily modified KDE based desktop, making it look and work like the previous 3.x series. There is surely room for a distribution which changes the focus of KDE software more to end users, making choices upstream finds hard to implement. This means mostly changing default configuration, choices of applications etc, all in all setting up an environment end users should be far more comfortable in.

The proposal is thus: let’s focus the openSUSE efforts on KDE as the main application and desktop provider and put a lot of effort in customizing, simplifying and polishing it to be ready for end users. Of course we should also make sure we cater as good as possible for Qt and KDE developers, giving for example MeeGo developers a welcoming home.